masterofmagicfandomcom-20200216-history
User blog:Nodemaster/Strategy tips and misc
I'm not sure whether I ever sent this stuff to the keeper of the FAQ, but when I looked at it last, this stuff didn't seem to be there, so I doubt anyone else has ever seen it. Thus, here it is. Actually, I might have sent it to him and he left out much of it. He said in 2003, "What I didn't add were: times where you mentioned editing the game file, and suggestions for spells, etc. Why? It made me too wistful for a sequel. Honestly, they're great suggestions, and I wish that they would make a MoM2 with all of those ideas in there." Therefore, anyone considering using these ideas in a new version, you have at least two votes in favor. --------- Other data changes I made: Items I changed: I got rid of the Cloak of Fear power on every item that had it, all + to hit on doom items, all + resistance on magic immunity items, and all phantasmal on doom items (sheesh). I increased all plate mail to at least +2 defense, all chain mail to at least +1 defense (the unenchanted metal is supposed to be at least that good). I changed many of the useless wands and staves to have more interesting powers, for example "Wand of Minor Curses" (1x warp wood), "Staff of Major Curses" (1x black prayer), "Rod of Animation" (4x animate dead, usable by life wizards to get undeads), "Rod of Redemption" (4x mass healing, usable by non-life wizards as their only heal item), Wand of Infinite Magic with a magic vortex spell, Staff of Storms with call lightning, another with mass invisibility, "Wand of Entanglement" (4x web), and surely some I forgot. Unfortunately, I didn't find where to fix what they're worth (and I didn't use ITEMMAKE), so the item I put in has the 'break' value of the item that used to be in that slot. --------- Strategy Tips: The Necromancer hero not only life-steals at range, he life-steals in melee, so if you can use Mind Storm or Warp Creature to reduce the resistance of creatures he's fighting, he's almost certain to do more damage with his life-stealing attack than with his pathetic melee attack, and almost certain to get more back in hits than he loses to whatever attacks him, so you'll get lots of undead creatures for almost free. By itself, Black Prayer is unlikely to make it safe for him to fight in melee, but an Illusionist friend along to throw Mind Storm for him makes the Necromancer a GREAT melee fighter, leaving a trail of undead legions wherever he goes! If you have Death books, you can enchant Vampiric power into a weapon. If you do, consider NOT giving the weapon extra attack and to-hit bonus, and using it with a hero with a very weak melee strength (such as the otherwise pathetic thief, rogue, assassin, or warrior mage), greatly increasing the chances of slain enemies turning into undeads under your control. If you give the enchanted weapon a powerful attack, the life stealing power will always be outmatched by the other damage done, and you'll never get any undeads from it. Instead, give it high defense and other abilities, and let the life stealing do the damage. A wraith can only fly at 2 steps per turn on the map, but if you stack it with a cavalry with Wraith Form, together they move 4 steps per turn. However, if you have a sprite in the same stack, they're back to two, unless you throw Wraith Form on it also. You can speed up Death Knights on the map by throwing Wraith Form on them and on some wolfriders and moving them together. Any otherwise useless spearman (say, undead, with one figure left), with Wraith Form, can double the speed of a stack of Shadow Demons. The Death magic form of Pathfinding! Even if you only have Death spells and can't get Flight, Endurance, Chaos Channels, or Pathfinding, you can throw Wraith Form on a lead engineer, then move it by itself to a new square, follow with the support engineers (four of them), and have the lead engineer build one square of road every turn anyway. So there's a way with every realm of magic! patched to fix this exploit, so skip it To reduce damage to a city you are taking over, keep your attackers outside the city limits (the 4x4 area) at all times, instead standing by the gate and waiting for defenders to come to you. Only if your units fly or are invisible, so the enemy won't come out, should you ever end a turn in city limits. If you can summon something to get them to come out, it may save a building or two. Better than taking conjurer, sorcery mastery, and 9 sorcery books (or nature, or chaos), take 8 books and archmage. Your spells will cost 10% more, but you'll have much more than that in extra casting skill, from the very beginning. For example, a conjurer-sorcerer with 9 books can only summon 4 phantom warriors (18/4), but an archmage-conjurer-sorcerer with 8 books can summon 5 phantom warriors (26/5) in one battle. The same sort of calculation applies to summoning sprites and hell hounds, for the other realms. Not only that, but it makes all of your spells FOUR times harder to dispel, instead of just double. But here's a better combination: 5 X books, X mastery (X = nature, sorcery, or chaos), channeler, alchemist, conjurer, archmage. X mastery plus archmage makes your spells 4 times harder to dispel (such as casting them in a node), alchemist plus channeler means every point of mana you cast in a battle spell only costs you ONE gold of taxes from your cities instead of SIX so you can pump all your mana income into increasing skill, X mastery plus conjurer plus archmage lets you conjure a LOT of stuff with your increased skill and reduced cost. --------- Comments on things that other people have reported as "bugs" and might have even "fixed" in a patched version that I think are neat features and should be left in: Armsmasters training undead units is COOL. They don't gain experience by sitting around, and you usually have better things for your armsmaster hero to do than sit around training a bunch of dead guys, so why NOT allow it? ("Come on, students! Look alive! Even if you aren't!") I think it's neat that Gaia's Blessing can turn chaos nodes into hills. Sure, you can argue it's a bug, and it does make it a bit harder for the player to find the node back, but it's still neat. ------- DP Category:Blog posts